CHAPTER XIV.

THE CLIMAX OF TRAGEDY.

HAMLET, with its tragic close, is the connecting-link between the problem-plays and the tragedies in the stricter sense, whose theme is the downfall of a noble nature through some ruinous sin. The change from the one group to the other is as the passage from a valley swathed in folds of mist into a bare, storm-swept upland. The baffling obscurity of Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida, the perplexing moral entanglements of All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, no longer confront us. The issues now awaiting solution are plain from the outset, and the catastrophes are too appalling to have an enigmatical significance. The change of theme and of treatment is accompanied by a change in the character of the leading figures. In the problem-plays the heroes had been young men reared amidst highly artificial social conditions. The tragic protagonists are beings of wellnigh superhuman stature, recalling the creations of Marlowe. They are mature in years, and they belong to races or to epochs distinguished by colossal passion and energies. A Celtic Chieftain and a Celtic King, both looming gigantic through the haze of tradition, a Moorish Commander and an Egyptian Queen, a primitive Roman warrior who is a veritable Mars in earthly mould,—such are the forms which stride in majestic procession before our eyes, and the spectacle of whose ruin convulses our inmost being with pity and terror. In Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus the deadweight of historical material hampered the free movement of the

tragic spirit, but in Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear it had unshackled sweep, and wrought itself into forms of unique sublimity.

The date of MACBETH cannot be fixed with complete certainty. The play first appeared in the folio of 1623. It must, however, be at least earlier than April 20, 1610, for on that day Dr. Forman saw it performed at the Globe, and recorded the main outlines of the plot in his Diary. On the other hand, it must be later than the accession of James I in March, 1603, for a number of passages are evidently intended as compliments to the sovereign who had shown special favour to the 'Globe' Company. Among these are Macbeth's vision of kings (Act iv. Sc. 2), including some 'that two-fold balls and treble sceptres carry,' and the incident (Act iv. Sc. 3) of touching for the king's evil, which James claimed as hereditary in the Stuart house1. Macbeth may therefore be placed without doubt between 1603 and 1610. Its precise date must be conjectural, but it is probably about 16062. The metrical characteristics are those of a late, but not the latest, period. Light endings appear for the first time in considerable number, but weak endings are still almost entirely absent. The style has many of the characteristics, in intensified form, of portions of Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida. It is pregnant, and elliptical often to the point of obscurity. The difficulties which it presents are, however,

1 The repeated references to witchcraft are similarly inspired, for it was a subject in which James had a peculiar interest. In 1589 the fleet in which he was bringing home his bride, Anne of Denmark, had been dispersed by a violent storm, and, in the belief that this was due to sorcery, he had taken vigorous proceedings against witches. In 1599 he had published his tract Demonologie, maintaining against sceptical attacks the reality of possession by evil spirits, and in 1604, the year after he came to the English throne, a new statute was passed against witchcraft. A play in which witches gave awful proof of their malign power would thus be peculiarly attractive to a monarch who believed himself to have been the victim of their baneful influence.

2 In Act iv. Sc. 1 of The Puritan, published in 1607, the words, 'Instead of a jester we'll have a ghost in a white sheet sit at the upper end of the table,' seems to be an allusion to Banquo's ghost, and, if so, 1606 or the early part of 1607 would be the latest date for the tragedy. The bestowal of Cawdor's honours on Macbeth may have been suggested by the investiture of Sir James Murray on April 7, 1605, with the dignities of Scone forfeited by the Earl of Gowry for conspiracy against James.

probably not entirely due to Shakspere. The earliest text, that of the first folio, is very unsatisfactory, and suggests that it has been taken from a stage-version. This would help to account for the unusual shortness of the play, and the number of incomplete lines. It has been conjectured that this stage-version is due to Middleton, who wrote for the King's Company between 1615 and 1624, and one of whose plays was called The Witch. The theory is that Middleton condensed Macbeth for theatrical purposes, inserting at the same time passages of his own, some of which resemble scenes in The Witch. The balance of evidence is in favour of the view that the play has been ‘edited' in all likelihood by Middleton, but that the interpolations are far fewer than some critics have asserted, and are to be found chiefly in the passages in the witch-scenes where Hecate appears1. The story of Macbeth had been poetically treated during Elizabeth's reign, but Shakspere's sole authority was Holinshed's Chronicle. He follows closely the account there given of the reigns of Duncan and Macbeth, though the central episode of the play, the midnight murder of Duncan, is based on Holinshed's earlier narrative of the assassination of King Duffe by Donwald, the governor of his castle, and his wife.

The theory of extensive interpolations in Macbeth has been chiefly advocated by the Clarendon Press editions and Fleay. The former ascribe to Middleton (a) portions of the witch-scenes, i. 3. 1-37; iii. 5; iv. 1. 39-47, 125-132. (b) The Porter scene, ii. 3. I-46. (c) The Sergeant scene, i. 2. (d) A number of miscellaneous passages, including the 'King's evil' scene, iv. 3. 140-159. Fleay accepts the Porter scene as genuine, but adds to Middleton's contributions in the witch-scenes, i. I, iv. 1. 71– 72, 79-81, 89-103, as also iii. 4. 130-144. He has a further theory that the weird sisters' of i. 3, the Scandinavian Norns or goddesses of destiny, are distinct from the witches' of iv. I. But he has to confess that Shakspere calls these 'witches' in iv. 1. 136 'the weird sisters.' This is fatal to his theory, which moreover draws distinctions of which Shakspere knew nothing.-The whole question of the interpolations is well discussed by E. K. Chambers in appendices E, F, G, to his edition of the play in the Warwick' Series. I agree substantially with his conclusion that the only passages which we have any warrant for ascribing to another hand are three: iii. 5, iv. 1. 39-43, iv. 1. 125-132. These are distinguished from the genuine witch-scenes by (1) the introduction of a superfluous character, Hecate; (2) Iambic instead of trochaic metre; (3) a lyrical element alien to the original conception of the witches.-For a defence of the genuineness of the Porter scene, which Coleridge had rejected before the C. P. editors, see Hales' paper The Porter in Macbeth in his Notes and Essays on Shakspere. Compare De Quincey's On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.

Thus, in Macbeth as in Hamlet, Shakspere sought his materials in the records of a semi-historic past. But, instead of Seandinavian saga, he now quarried in the richer mine of Celtic legend. The significance of Macbeth as a novel point of departure in English literature has scarcely been fully enough recognized. Now for the first time did the southern country levy a return for the toll which Scotch bards had taken from it for so long. During the fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries the poets north of the Tweed, from King James to Sir David Lyndesay, while showing a sturdy patriotism in the spirit of their verse, had borrowed its forms almost exclusively from Chaucer. Hitherto England had received no equivalent, but the balance was more than redressed when the annals of Caledonia, stern and wild' furnished Shakspere with the materials of one of his mightiest creations. He may have visited Scotland as a member of the company of which Laurence Fletcher, one of the Lord Chamberlain's Servants, was the head, and whose presence at Aberdeen is recorded in the register of the Town Council for October, 1601. But, however this may be, he pierced, with an intuition that in an Elizabethan Englishman was wellnigh miraculous, into the very heart of Highland romance. The desolate storm-swept heaths, where the evil powers of earth and sky may fittingly meet and greet in hideous carnival; the lonely castles, where passions of primaeval intensity find their natural home, and where, at dead of night, murder may stealthily move to its design; the eerie atmosphere, where the hoarse croak of the raven and the scream of the owl, the fatal bellman, foretell the impending doom, and where the wraith of the victim stalks to the head of the board in the assassin's banquetinghall-every detail is steeped in the peculiar genius of Celtic Scotland. Hitherto this fertile poetic material had found its chief expression in ballads of weird imaginative power, but these, though of supreme excellence in their kind, were only Volkslieder, and had no more than a local circulation. But now Shakspere claimed for universal purposes what had hitherto been the monopoly of the clans. His mighty art preserved all the mysticism and elemental passion of the Highland story, while investing it with a stupendous moral significance of which its

Celtic originators had never dreamed. So Titanic is the theme as handled by the dramatist that, contrary to his usual practice, he does not complicate it with episodes, but develops it in its isolated grandeur. Thus Macbeth is, of all the great tragedies, the simplest in structure. It was requisite to know society at Elsinore through and through before we could grasp the problem of Hamlet's career; but to judge of the Thane of Cawdor and his wife, we need only focus our gaze upon the lurid revelations of their own hearts.

But Shakspere never entirely isolates the individual from his environment, and in the opening scene of the play mysterious agents hover through the air, sinister in aspect and in speech. These witches or weird sisters are the embodiment, in visible form, of the malignant influences in nature which are ever on the alert to establish an unholy alliance with the criminal instincts of the human heart. Dowden rightly dismisses as inadequate Gervinus's interpretation of them as simply the embodiment of inward temptation. These 'posters of the sea and land' are not merely concrete symbols of a mental process; nameless and sexless though they be, theirs is an independent vitality of evil whirling through the universe till it finds asylum in a soul where germs of sin lie ready to be quickened into life. That a subtle reciprocity already exists between Macbeth and these demoniacal forces is emphasized at the outset by Shakspere, for the witches' anarchical formula, Fair is foul and foul is fair,' is echoed in the Thane's first words on the heath near Forres, 'So foul and fair a day I have not seen.' Yet to outward appearance Macbeth is not the man in whom the Powers of Darkness could claim an ally. As we first see him, he is returning from a well-foughten field where, by brilliant feats of arms against his country's foes, without and within, he has proved himself 'valour's minion, Bellona's bridegroom lapped in proof.' In gratitude for his loyal services his sovereign has, on the first tidings of victory, sent to greet him with the title of the traitor whom he has overthrown in battle. But the weird sisters are more lynx-eyed than the meek, unsuspicious Duncan. The hero whom the king delights to honour already cherishes a fell design against his royal master's life and throne. He has 'broken' this enterprise